That is the overarching goal of the newly remodeled trauma center at UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest.

In a level 1 trauma center, where the most severely injured patients often arrive by helicopter, every tick of the clock is precious.

Dr. Raul Coimbra, chief of the university’s trauma division, said the changes made at the Hillcrest hospital are designed to save as many minutes as possible for those whose chance of survival decreases with every passing second.

“On average, a patient should be here no more than 30 minutes from beginning to end. I think we will drop it to about 20 minutes or so,” Coimbra said.

That number, the trauma chief said, refers to the average resuscitation time for patients whose injuries require diagnosis.

Some patients with obvious injuries, like gunshot victims, go straight to the operating room minutes after arrival.

But many arrive unconscious with internal injuries and need the trauma team to quickly figure out what’s wrong.

“If you’re in a car crash and I don’t know what injuries you have, but you have low blood pressure, I know you probably have internal bleeding. To figure all of that out at any trauma center in the country, it takes 30 to 45 minutes. I think I can cut some of that time off using this technology,” Coimbra said, gesturing to a bank of instrumentation near one of the trauma center’s four beds.

It is not that the remodeled facility contains never-before-used technology. Rather, it employs existing technologies in more efficient ways.

Dr. Johnathan Jones, the hospital’s trauma program manager, said X-rays are a good example.

In the old trauma center, he said, a mobile X-ray machine would be wheeled to the bedside, and a technician would have to slide a special plate below the part of the patient that was to be X-rayed.

Now the entire platform that the new center’s four beds sit on is itself an X-ray plate. Sliding along two sets of ceiling-mounted tracks, new X-ray machines can be moved over patients in seconds with no need to fuss with moving the patient to position plates.

“It usually took about 10 minutes to get an image. With this setup, it takes about 15 seconds,” Jones said.

That image can be immediately displayed on a large, flat-screen video monitor above each bed, right next to a patient’s vital statistics and test results, giving the entire trauma team a real-time view of information they used to have to visit a computer cart to obtain.

Other medical equipment is now mounted on specialized booms attached to the ceiling, creating more room around each bed for trauma workers.

“The whole design of this facility is to have everything at your fingertips,” Jones said.

San Diego County is divided into five trauma catchment areas, with UC San Diego Hillcrest handling all cases west of Interstate 805 from Interstate 8 south to the border. Though it is the smallest of the five areas, UCSD’s territory is the most densely populated. The facility also takes cases from Imperial County.